Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for encoding and decoding audio signals.
Background
Audio encoders and decoders are widely used for various applications such as wireless communication, Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), multimedia, digital audio, etc. An audio encoder receives an audio signal at an input bit rate, encodes the audio signal based on a coding scheme, and generates a coded signal at an output bit rate that is typically lower (and sometimes much lower) than the input bit rate. This allows the coded signal to be sent or stored using fewer resources.
An audio encoder may be designed based on certain presumed characteristics of an audio signal and may exploit these signal characteristics in order to use as few bits as possible to represent the information in the audio signal. The effectiveness of the audio encoder may then be dependent on how closely an actual audio signal matches the presumed characteristics for which the audio encoder is designed. The performance of the audio encoder may be relatively poor if the audio signal has different characteristics than those for which the audio encoder is designed.